Category: Scrum

A few weeks ago, we had the chance to do Myers-brigs at our office. As it turns out I am an INTJ. You can find your own type on this site human-metrics.

As a base rule, mixing individuals from different personality types leads to better creativity albeit at the expense of efficiency.

Developers, in particular, have an even more nuanced environment. Fred Brooks famously said:

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures....

This means as you grow your team, there are certain things to look out for. In this entry, we will be exploring the factors I think are the most important.

Does the team structure compliment individual’s strengths?

We perform best from a position of strength, yet somehow team leaders assign individuals to tasks optimised for the organisation rather than for the individual’s strength.

A simple test such as the MBTI can help you easily see who would work best with who.

As Wegner proposed in 1985 the greater intelligence born of the group mind which comes about from great collaboration is guaranteed to benefit your organisation.

Is anyone multitasking?

Human’s can not multitask. The illusion feels so powerful that the team leads don’t even need to push this agenda, the developers will take it upon themselves to do it!

Two projects are optimal for an individual developer, in this way, they can switch to a different task to give their mind a break and some room to chew on the project. Anything more is likely to lead to reduced productivity as the mind becomes too clouded.

Have you limited the team size?

We have limited cognitive ability in terms of the number of individuals we can maintain in our circle. Known as Dunbar’s number, it is shown we can actively keep at most 150 active social contacts.

I believe working groups are even smaller. Once the team size gets to more than 5, communication issues start sipping in. It becomes that much harder for the team to build and maintain a shared mental model.

Mike Cohn has an even simpler rule, no team should be so big it can’t be adequately fed by two pizzas!

What is the team’s purpose?

Shortly after joining Moringa, I was having problems getting the team to work together let alone towards any goal. I explained my dilemma to the CEO. She asked me, “Have you carried out a values exercise?”.

This question changed how I think about teams, yes we can impose what we want to the team, but the team just like any other complex system will work towards its own goals.

The only way to get your team to succeed is to imbue them with a sense of purpose which aligns with the organisation.

Can the team deliver the product from end to end?

A basic tenet of the scrum and agile methodologies, in general, is the concept of the cross functional team. The simplest definition I could find of such a team was:

A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal.

Cross functional teams are the killer feature of agile. They bring about diverse views to the teams enabling good ideas to be quickly tested, built and shipped.

Scrum is a fast moving development style. There is obviously a lot of advantage to this, but just like a sports car needs a better technical design to function at top notch, so does your code.

In this entry, we will be looking at the top three technical practices that you must adopt to ensure you are moving as fast as you could be.

Test driven development

A few days ago, our team was faced with the challenge of stress testing one of our applications. One particular use case proved particularly hard to do, the only way to run it was to literally have an actual human run through the steps!

This might be fair if we were doing UX testing, but in this case, it proved to be a big red warning sign on our architecture.

We have since worked to correct our process, but the point here is TDD helps you unravel problems before they become Problems.

By writing the test first then the code, you are forced to think through what it is you actually want to do. This makes your code clearer as well.

Not to mention, by having a “second opinion” on the validity of your code, you can deploy far faster knowing another system is checking the integrity of the entire product.

Continuous improvement

If you have ever struggled with your weight, I am certain this thought has ever come up in your mind at one point or another

Let me just eat this burger, I will work it all out later in the gym

A fantastically bad idea! Not because you will procrastinate later and not visit the gym, thou this is likely, but because you essentially threw a good chance of working towards your goal and worse compromised your future self.

In the same way, almost every day you jump into your code, you will come across an opportunity for improvement perhaps a better design pattern to adopt or even just to maximise on an opportunity to reuse code. Here you have the choice of either saying you will just do a patch now and fix it in the future or just fixing it now.

The formal term for it is refactoring and there is a wealth of knowledge out there on how to do it.

By continuously improving your code, not only will your code not rot but you will have code that gets better with age.

Collective ownership

We all care more about what we know someone else will look at than what we are sure only our eyes will see.

The long and short of it is you want as many eyeballs on your code as possible. Obviously open sourcing your code may not be the ideal solution, but what about having your team members work on the code together?

There shouldn’t be a part fully designated to only one developer, this gives you two key advantages:

Not everything goes to hell if the developer goes on holiday

Everyone cleans up their code just a bit better

Continuous delivery

In 2001, Paul Graham wrote one of the most prescient essays I have ever come across, it is titled The Other Road Ahead.

One of his key arguments revolves around the fact that faster code-test-deploy cycles lead to higher quality code.

I fully agree with this argument. Continuous delivery is guaranteed to significantly reduce if not eliminate the stress which comes naturally with software development.

No longer will demo day be a day of panic. For all intents and purposes, it will just be another day in the life of the boss developer.

I hope these pointers will help you towards a better scrum experience.

This situation is so common, it is by now something of an industry standard. There is almost no project that I have stepped into that had an appropriate amount of time scheduled for it.

You have to wonder why after all these years we still suck at allocating enough resources to get the project done in time.

In this entry, we will be looking at some of the common factors that lead to unrealistic schedules.

External deadlines

Development happens in a context. Unless it is a hobby project, you can be sure that whatever you are working on, someone else is depending on your work output for them to do their job.

A special case would be where the bid specifies the timeline in which the product must be built. In this case, submitting a longer timeline, even if justifiable may mean losing the project.

Since the project is still of interest to the team, the team takes it on knowing full well how tight the deadline is in the process displaying a mix of childish optimism and wishful thinking.

Best case estimates

Murphy warned us:

Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong

Scrum and other agile techniques give us robust estimation tools. But even with those, we more often than not end up with a range, say 3 – 5 months.

Unless you don’t like promotions, who wants to go to the boss with the higher estimate?

Of course, the problem with the lower estimate is that it holds the implicit assumption that everything will go right.

This is a dangerous assumption, you take it for granted that you have the best tools, language, physical environment, skills etc. When something does eventually go wrong, you find yourself with an unrealistic schedule.

Feeling up to a challenge

For reasons that are beyond me. Some developers prefer working under insane conditions. Something about an all-nighter makes them feel like heroes.

Whether inspired by cut throat work environment or personal bias, teams in these kinds of environments will consistently underestimate how long the project will take.

Even if the pressure is acceptable in the short run, the effect on the team morale and product quality are bound to suffer. Better to have a reasonable schedule and spend any extra time beefing up the quality.

Belief that developers work better under pressure

Times of need can be artificially manufactured by creating deadlines. Our brain doesn’t know the difference. When you create deadlines, your brain stops procrastinating and gives you what you need.

It is easy to extrapolate this kind of thinking to the entire project.

While you do need to pace yourself, you need to be very careful of the kinds of commitments that you make. In a previous entry Estimates, Targets and Commitments. We looked at the dangers of confusing the terms.

You don’t want to make a commitment to your client based on the belief that somehow the deadline will boost productivity if you must make such a commitment, let it be internal.

Scope creep

Inevitably, new ideas will come in. Change is a core part of the software development process.

The problem arises when new changes are introduced to the project but nothing is removed from the backlog. As new features are added, eventually the entirety of the work pushed the project to an unrealistic one.

We have looked at this problem in greater detail here Managing scope creep. The TL;DR is any new change is also a chance to renegotiate commitments.

Have you faced unrealistic schedules in your own practice? How did you handle it? Talk to me in the comment section below or on my twitter @jchex